In my class this week, we talked about the epistolary form. We wrote letters in class. I always struggle with in-class writing (which might help explain why I make my own students do it every day), but today I took some of my scribbles and tried to make them make a little more sense.
Dear Grandma,
I want to know why I couldn’t play with the Nisse in the kitchen. Why his place was on the wall, not in my hand. Was he being punished for failing his protective duties? Or did his duties require his position in that precise place?
Had he been derelict all those years ago? Or just in the wrong location?
When I ask people about you, they often scrunch up their noses. They probably don’t know they do it, and if they do, they probably don’t know I see it.
When I ask people about you, they sometimes have little to say, so I’ve learned to watch and wait while they take a shovel to their brains. When they excavate a few words, one of them is usually “difficult.”
When I ask people about you, they often sigh.
Was that Nisse in the house with you when you found out you were a widow? Were you in the kitchen—the one in the old house, not this one—with the Nisse? Was it a phone call? Did you consider taking the Nisse with you when you did whatever it was the people on the phone told you to do? Did you want his protection?
No, nevermind, I know he stayed to watch the kitchen. Protect the home.
Nissen murder cows when they are not fed their preferred food in their preferred way, Grandma. Bloodthirsty potential in tiny bodies. Rage-implicated preferences.
Or traditions.
Stasis.
Is that “difficult?” I was too young to know.
Is it anger? Or grief?
Does the rage saturate the place where it is experienced? Was the Nisse’s imprisonment actually containment?
Here are things I know about your husband:
He is the only one of my grandparents I never met, but he’s the only one with a key to my office at work.
He needed naps.
Did you need naps? Did you sleep at night when your husband traveled for work?
Nissen murder cows when they are not fed what they want. Is that why you didn’t punish me for swiping lemon drops? Is that why I need naps when my husband travels for work?
A Nisse sits on my piano. He can see the kitchen from there. When we are alone, sometimes I play and he seems okay with it. He’s not difficult. I wonder if I am.
I don’t have any cows.